Kids who struggle to stay motivated and engaged in school (and life) often struggle with executive function. This is a critical network of skills that governs your ability to start on a task, keep yourself motivated and engaged, and create an efficient plan to get the work done. While it’s a broad umbrella of skills, executive function has many sub-categories. In most cases, your child won’t struggle in every single one of these, but almost all of us are weaker in at least one or more.
What Are the 8 Parts of Executive Function?
When we sit down with parents to discuss their child’s issues with executive function, here are the 8 key areas we look at:
- Initiation: is your child able to avoid procrastination to start on a task?
- Shifting: can your child easily shift from one task to the next? (Or if interrupted, can you come back to where you left off?)
- Planning and organization: do they plan their time and prioritize what needs to be done and when?
- Emotional control: is your child able to regulate their emotional responses to situations, tasks, people, or events?
- Self-monitoring: can they go back and check their own work?
- Working memory: are they able to stay on task, in the moment, remembering each of the key pieces of information they need to use to get the job done?
- Inhibition: can your child control impulses to check their phone, pet the dog, watch that YouTube video and keep themselves on task?
- Materials organization: is your child’s backpack a wreck? Do they struggle to gather all the materials they need for a task ahead of time?
Looking Deeper into Your Child’s Struggles
Maybe your child struggles with just 1 or 2 of these areas. Or all 8 of the skills listed above are sticking points. Regardless, what goes even deeper and more foundational than these executive functioning skills are your child’s cognitive skills.
You can’t teach organization if they don’t have strong visual processing and logic. You can’t expect easy shifting between tasks if they have weak attention, working memory, and processing speed. Kids struggle with initiation when they don’t know how to figure out where to start… much less how to do the task itself.
Cognitive skills are the foundation of all of these executive functions. Weaknesses in these core learning skills have real-life implications for your kids.
If you want to improve your child’s executive function, our encouragement is to take a step back. First, investigate their cognitive skills. Then, as you do the work of building up these foundational learning skills, these higher-level functions can become more natural as well!